The Paying Guests(12)
She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery, to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn’t a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments – these moments when, paradoxically, she was also at her most anonymous. But it was the anonymity that did it. She never felt the electric charge when she walked through London with someone at her side. She never felt the excitement that she felt now, seeing the fall of the shadow of a railing across a set of worn steps. Was it foolish, to feel like that about the shadow of a railing? Was it whimsy? She hated whimsy. But it only became whimsy when she tried to put it into words. If she allowed herself simply to feel it… There. It was like being a string, and being plucked, giving out the single, pure note that one was made for. How odd, that no one else could hear it! If I were to die today, she thought, and someone were to think over my life, they’d never know that moments like this, here on the Horseferry Road, between a Baptist chapel and a tobacconist’s, were the truest things in it.
She crossed the street, swinging her bag, and a couple of gulls wheeled overhead, letting out those seaside cries that could be heard sometimes right in the middle of London, that always made her think that just around the next corner she would find the pier.
She did her shopping at the market stalls of Strutton Ground, going from one stall to another before committing herself, wanting to be sure that she was ferreting out the bargains; she ended up with three reels of sewing thread, half a dozen pairs of flawed silk stockings and a box of nibs. The walk from Vauxhall had made her hungry, and with her purchases stowed away she began to think about her lunch. Often on these trips she ate at the National Gallery, the Tate – somewhere like that, where the refreshment rooms were so bustling that it was possible to order a pot of tea, then sneak out a home-made bun to have with it. That was a spinsterish thing to do, however; she wouldn’t be a spinster today. Good grief, she was only twenty-six! She found a ‘cosy corner’ café and bought herself a hot lunch: egg, chips and bread and butter, all for a shilling and sixpence, including a penny tip for the waitress. She resisted the temptation to mop the plate with the bread and butter, but felt quite vulgar enough to roll herself a cigarette. She smoked it to the satisfying chink and splash of crockery and water that floated up from the basement kitchen: the sound of someone else washing up.
She walked to Buckingham Palace after that, not from any sentimental feeling about the King and Queen – whom, on the whole, she considered to be a pair of inbred leeches – but simply for the pleasure of being there, at the grand centre of things. For the same reason, after she had wandered about in St James’s Park she crossed the Mall and climbed the steps and went up to Piccadilly. She strolled a little way along Regent Street simply for the sake of its curve, pausing to goggle at the prices on the cards in the smart shop windows. Three-guinea shoes, four-guinea hats… A place on a corner was selling Persian antiques. A decorated jar was so tall and so round that a thief might hide in it. She thought, with a smile: Mrs Barber would like that.
There were no smart shops once she had crossed Oxford Circus. London made one of its costume changes, like whipping off a cloak; it became a shabby muddle of pianola sellers, Italian grocers, boarding-houses, pubs. But she liked the names of the streets: Great Castle, Great Titchfield, Riding House, Ogle, Clipstone – her friend, Christina, lived on this last one, in two rooms on the top floor of an ugly, newish building. Frances went in by a brown-tiled passage, greeted the porter in his booth, passed on to the open courtyard and began the long climb up the stairs. As she approached Christina’s landing she could hear the sound of her typewriter, a fluid, hectic tap-tap-tap. She paused to catch her breath, put her finger to the push of the doorbell, and the typewriting ceased. A moment later Christina opened the door, tilting up her small, pale, pointed face for Frances’s kiss, but narrowing her eyes and blinking.
‘I can’t see you! I can only see letters, hopping about like fleas. Oh, I shall go blind, I know I shall. Just a minute, while I bathe my brow.’
She slipped past Frances to wash her hands at the sink on the landing, and then to hold the hands to her forehead. She came back rubbing at an eye with a wet knuckle.
The building was run by a society offering flats to working women. Christina’s neighbours were school-mistresses, stenographers, lady clerks; she herself made her living by typing up manuscripts and dissertations for authors and students, and by odd bits of secretarial and book-keeping work. Just now, she told Frances as she led her into the flat, she was helping out on a new little paper, a little political thing; she had been typing up statistics on the Russian Famine, and the constant fiddling about with the margins had given her a headache. Then, of course, there were the figures themselves, so many hundreds of thousands dead, so many hundreds of thousands still starving. It was miserable work.
‘And the worst of it is,’ she said guiltily, ‘it’s made me so hungry! And there isn’t a bit of food in the flat.’
Frances opened her bag. ‘Hey presto – there is, now. I’ve made you a cake.’
‘Oh, Frances, you haven’t.’
‘Well, a currant loaf. I’ve been carrying it about with me, and it weighs a ton. Here you are.’